The Video Game Systems of the 1983 Sears Wishbook

1983 was the year of the video game crash and that year’s Sears Wishbook was chock full of the detritus of a bloated dying industry. You got the handhelds, Vectrex, Gemini, Colecovision, Intellivision, Odyssey 2, Atari 2600 and Atari 5200 in this issue. Along with some great games and accessories. My favorite is the Handsome Hassock storage system on Page 9. I would love one of those now.

A great system with games that were very realistic for a home system. Those Hand-grip controllers were one of the more interesting form factors for this gaming era.

Mr. Do!!!

Every one of these was great, but I have a special place in my hearts for anything with smurfs in it.

Well, consider how the joystick got its name. It was a control for aeroplanes that came up between the legs of the pilot.

So don’t be surprised. The things always had a phallic innuendo, and it doesn’t help that some adult toys are made to camouflage themselves as more innocuous objects. “Oh no, Mum, that’s just a wireless joystick!”

Damn those pages bring back memories. I remember Sears having their own version of the Intellivision. All the games and the console were the same as Mattel’s, only the names of everything were changed (and were usually cheaper than the same games at Toys R Us).

I used to spend hours looking at these pages, dreaming of owning all upon ’em. Ahhh…to be twelve again.

Longtime friends of mine were sales execs for Mattel and Atari at the time. 2 weeks after the ’83 Christmas, everybody in sales was fired, especially the guys with diamond pinkie rings and fat cigars. Some had made $500k the year before.

Frogger on Colecovision (plus four slices of buttered toast with cinnamon and sugar and a giant glass of milk)… I never understood what was supposed to be so tragic about being a “latchkey kid” in the 80s. It felt pretty damned okay at the time.